On Monday Oct. 21, 2024, Women in Audio hosted “Horror Foley Night” in the sound studio on the 7th floor of 1104 S. Wabash. From 6 to 9 p.m. students filed into the small audio suite to learn more about foley production as part of a Wicked Week celebration. 

Foley is the act of duplicating everyday sound effects that are added to films, videos and other media during post-production to enhance the audio quality. Activities in the studio included recreating smashing watermelons, cracking vegetables, followed by leaving the space with some Halloween goodies. 

Students in the group worked together to perform and recreate gory sounds through foley from a horror movie scene in the movie “Alien: Covenant”.

Senior sound design major Kassandra Borah worked with students to facilitate the foley audio and engineer the event. 

“I’m most excited to give people the opportunity to do something I wasn’t able to do last year,” Borah said. “I thought it would be fun to throw an event that people can come and try it out.”

Borah who is also the secretary of Women in Audio hosted the event to give students hands-on experience with working with foley, based on assistance from the audio suite and skills she learned from a foley class on campus. 

The session began where participants were given a cue sheet with numerous sounds from the film roughly lasting 10-20 seconds in length. The film was then played from the scene with no sound followed by the scene with a series of beeps to signal to the foley artist where the audio needed to be placed. 

First-year musical theater major Dash Mangrulkar said that the foley event was exciting after seeing the purpose behind sound making for film. 

“I thought it was very fun getting hands on with the sound effect making,” Mangrulkar said. “I got to crush watermelon between my fingers, but then it was actually for a purpose, and it was really interesting to see what kind of went into that.” 

Students were given the opportunity to rotate between positions including recording audio, making the foley sounds and pressing the talk button to communicate with the foley artists. Some of the supplies used for foley included slime and liquid egg whites for blood, celery for bone-breaking and watermelons for skin. 

Throughout the event, staff and members from the audio suite also assisted with troubleshooting offering advice for students about audio techniques and editing skills. 

Tiffany Griffith, assistant professor in the School of Audio and Music, who teaches classes about audio, video and multimedia, automated dialogue replacement, and foley helped supervise the event with the goal of helping students become better at recording and mixing audio. 

“Audio is a technical thing that is also fun, you get to create all these really cool, super fun sounds while you’re doing foley,” she said. 

Griffith says that as a professional sound editor the whole sound process from dialogue, to effects, background, foley and music “all come together” after each person comes together editing their part of the picture. 

Senior double majoring in fashion studies and audio arts, Annabella Thornton said she hopes that students leave with learning about another avenue of audio.

“One of our board members this year is taking up a foley class and is really passionate about it, so she was able to kind of help us orchestrate it this year,” said Thornton. “We want [students] to get hands-on in a part of audio that they might not have explored yet.” 

The space served as an opportunity to learn how to use foley and learn more about the resources that are included in the audio studio. 

Copy edited by Manuel Nocera